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Sunday, 4 August 2013

Cambodia: Time for Transformation?

Written by Caroline Hughes

Tuesday, 30 July 2013 But would things change if the opposition were able to form a government?A strong showing for Cambodia's opposition in Sunday's
election suggests a rekindling of democratic hopes in the country.
Commentators have suggested that increasing numbers of young voters - a
networked and Facebooked post-war generation - have swung the vote away
from the authoritarian Cambodian People's Party for the first time in a
decade.

However, the CPP has never enjoyed the overwhelming majorities that
governments in neighboring Malaysia or Singapore are used to. It is the
CPP's landslide win in the 2008 election - at the height of a boom,
against a divided opposition, and with a border dispute with Thailand
threatening to break into warfare - that was unusual. Aside from that
election, the voters have always been fairly evenly split between pro-
and anti-CPP blocs.

The reason for this is that the postwar settlement in Cambodia, ushered
in by a United Nations peacekeeping mission, has divided Cambodia into a
nation of haves and have-nots. The country's economic reconstruction
has been achieved through wholesale privatization of land, water,
forests and fisheries, minerals, beaches and other resources. Since the
free-market reforms that preceded the UN peacekeeping mission, the
majority of the population, which engages in labor intensive and
low-tech forms of rice farming for survival, has seen their access to
resources such as water, timber, fish and fertilizer sharply restricted.

At the same time, a series of land laws has not resulted in security of
land tenure for many Cambodians. Land disputes remain a major source of
social discontent, especially in border areas where military units
sustain claims to large areas of land previously used for bases or
maneuvers, and in urban areas where rapidly increasing property values
have led to violent evictions of urban poor communities.

At the same time, inadequate health services prompt the poor to sell
land to pay for medical care, and a corrupt judiciary invariably finds
for the richer party in land disputes. Because of these factors,
inequality in landholdings, negligible in the late 1980s when Cambodia
emerged from a socialist regime, has become one of the most skewed in
Asia.

As in the former Soviet Union, free market reforms in Cambodia have
produced a class of wealthy and politically influential Cambodian
tycoons. Many of the most powerful initially made their fortunes from
state-awarded monopolies over import and export of goods such as petrol,
pharmaceuticals and luxury liquor brands. They currently benefit from a
development strategy that has seen millions of hectares of land awarded
to developers for establishing plantations, displacing local people and
ignoring customary rights to resources.

In return, wealthy businessmen sponsored ruling party campaigns. In the
1990s, this included military campaigns against the insurgent Khmer
Rouge and against the royalist party that won the UN-organized election
but whose leader was ousted by a coup in 1997. More recently, tycoons
have sponsored development drives in which CPP assistance for local
development projects - roads, irrigation schemes and schools - is
awarded in return for voter support at the polls. These development
drives involve regular visits by members of the CPP party hierarchy to
Cambodian village to spend time with village leaders and notables, and
formal ceremonies in which villagers are expected to come and show their
gratitude for the party's generosity.

This development strategy has been very effective in producing a climate
of surveillance and co-optation in villages, where nobody wants to be
branded a rebel for fear of losing access to the goods on offer. In
impoverished communities, loss of support from village leaders and
exclusion from the benefits of development can be a matter of life and
death. Discussion of the source of this wealth - in the mass
privatization of resources previously freely accessed by the poor - is
strictly taboo.

Yet Cambodians have continued to protest whenever they are able. They
protest against evictions, corruption, dispossessions and abuse of
power. In 2012, 232 people were arrested for protesting over land rights
in Cambodia, and one environmental activist was murdered. In the
garment factories, which employ 300,000 young women for some of the
lowest wages in Asia, and produce Cambodia's major manufactured export,
unions organize in the face of continued discrimination and abuse, and
strikes are frequent.

And in national elections, a hard core of support has continued to vote
for an opposition whose leaders have been repeatedly vilified in pro-CPP
media, prosecuted, intimidated and exiled.

The question for Cambodia, however, is whether votes for the opposition can produce change. The state apparatus and military are all staunchly CPP. The opposition coalition is led by one former Finance Minister who in his brief spell in office attempted genuinelybut unsuccessfully to combat corruption, and a former human rights activist. Perhaps these two can muster sufficient political influence to inspire Cambodia's weak anti-corruption regime and prompt some improvement in Cambodia's weak and politicized judiciary.

But it is hard to gauge from opposition party pronouncements how they
might produce a development strategy for Cambodia that would
significantly differ from that over which the CPP has presided. In terms
of development, Cambodia has simply followed its more advanced South
East Asian neighbors in pursuing a strategy of asset stripping the
countryside and soaking up the dispossessed rural poor into low-wage
manufacturing and services employment in the towns.

Aside from cleaning up law enforcement and improving health and education somewhat, neither the opposition nor any of Cambodia's international donors are advocating anything much different. Chinese demand for commodities combined with the interest of Western pension funds in investing in primary sectors such as rubber and mining in the recent commodities boom entail that inward investment is oriented towards big extractive industries, rather than small scale alternatives.

Regional investment has followed suit, combined with some investment in
low-wage manufacturing for brands such as Gap and Disney. This suits the
Cambodian tycoons, no matter who runs the government.

The opposition's healthy showing in this election suggests that many
Cambodians continue to look for change: but it is not clear that either
the Cambodian elite or the outside world will offer them a significant
opportunity to achieve it.

(Caroline Hughes is a Professor of Conflict Resolution and Peace at the University of Bradford in the UK)